By James Riswick
Assistant Opinions Editor
Things were really looking good for baseball for a while. An incredible World Series was capped off with a nail-biting, come-from-behind victory in Game 7 by the Arizona Diamondbacks to defeat the all-powerful New York Yankees. It looked like baseball was finally recapturing the hearts of the many fans put off by the 1994 strike.
Unfortunately, this turnaround lasted less than a week. Only days after the Series ended, Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig announced his plan to contract — or eliminate — two teams before the start of the 2002 season. It might have seemed like a good idea, but just like the art of hitting, it’s all about timing, and Selig’s was awful.
It’s not as much the idea of contraction that is so confounding, it’s the way Selig handled the situation as delicately as a bull in a china shop. By announcing his plans for contraction so close to one the greatest World Series of all time, not only did Selig make baseball look bad, he made himself look like the bad guy.
On the surface, contraction is a great idea. There are just simply too many teams. But more important, there are too many teams that act as cannon fodder for the MLB’s big guns. Also, some of those teams simply cannot afford to survive in a sport where there is no salary cap and championships go to the highest bidder. For every small market Oakland A’s team going to the playoffs, there are five big spenders.
Since small market clubs like the Montreal Expos or Minnesota Twins (the two teams that would have been contracted this off-season) aren’t able to compete, they obviously can’t win, and nobody wants to go see a team lose every night. To make matters worse, these teams usually have older ballparks that aren’t as attractive to casual fans as say, ones that have a pool in right field.
The Expos for instance, are a low quality team, they have horrendous attendance and their stadium is a dump.
Contraction has been called off for now, but Selig has promised to bring it up next season. The Expos will still probably be toast, but hopefully by then, the Twins will have turned it around and Selig will have realized that if he is going to ax a team, it should be the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. They are awful, with little hope of improvement and a 30-year agreement to play in the terrible Tropicana Field. Minnesota has too much history and too much potential to get rid of the Twins.
The Devil Rays are only four years old. It would be better to correct a mistake than let it fester for a while and decide it should be contracted as well.
Baseball has far too many problems that cannot be easily fixed, and definitely not by contraction alone. Baseball needs a salary cap no matter how much the players’ association complains that they won’t be able to put food on their families tables with one. To his credit, Selig has suggested a luxury tax on teams with payrolls above $98 million. That’s good, but not nearly enough.
If past seasons weren’t enough to prove that a salary cap is needed, this off-season should have certainly driven home the point. Many teams did not sign any significant free agents and there was only one Alex Rodriguez-like contract (Jason Giambi with the Yankees).
With only a handful of teams turning a profit last year, clubs were not prepared to spend ridiculous amounts of money on players that don’t deserve it. Even a player like Barry Bonds who only hit 73 home runs last year didn’t get the gross sum of money he was expecting.
Baseball desperately needs a salary cap to survive, but it’s not going to help this upcoming season. With the way the Yankees restocked this off-season, D’back fans in Phoenix and all you other Yankee haters out there had better not get your hopes up.
Although I despise the Yankees, I have to admit that it would be nice to cheer for a team that is almost a lock to win the Series even before spring training opens. The problem is, though, it makes baseball terribly boring. If the Yankees’ payroll keeps growing, there’s not going to be any real competition left. If every season, everyone knows the Yankees are going to win, what’s the point of it all? Why would anyone want to watch the other 29 teams? Even New York fans would get bored watching their team totally shellac opponents night after night.
The spirit of baseball, like every other sport, is competition. Without a salary cap and with such a large disparity between small market and big market teams, competition will no longer exist. Never mind the Twins and Expos, baseball as a whole will die. I don’t want to see that happen, and I know Twin and Yankee fans don’t want it to either.
February 21, 2002
